Thoreau-related publications

In this essay we examine the work of nineteenth-century American philosopher Henry David Thoreau to see how his thought relates to common arguments for and against Basic Income. We find that Thoreau would be unlikely to champion cash grants as an anti-poverty measure, but that he would endorse a Basic Income variant meant to support the development of human potential.

In the particularly unsavory presidential campaign season of 2016, Thoreau’s descriptive references to “election cake” fungi leapt off his journal pages and caught our attention. . . . Election cake was a sweet yeast bread traditionally served on Election Day in 18th and 19th-century New England. . . . What was it about this particular fungus that inspired Thoreau to give it this nickname in his journal? And to which fungus might hehave been referring?

Thoreau was a prodigious walker. By his own account, his constitution required walking four hours a day at least. And he did not walk as others did. His contemporaries agreed that the self- styled “saunterer” had a distinctive gait. . . . Could Thoreau’s character . . . be read in his gait?

In 1840, Massachusetts abolished compulsory militia service. . . . Thoreau turned 18 in July of 1835. In 1837 he completed college and returned home to Concord. According to the letter of the law, he should have been enrolled and drilling with the local militia from late 1837 until 1840. The image, to us, is preposterous — this icon of individualism and nonconformity, who preaches that we should step to our own music, here marching in formation in the streets and fields of Concord, standing at attention and saluting, loading and firing a gun on command. Did it really happen?

Adam Smith is usually remembered as a champion of commerce. But as a moral philosopher he understood that even as commerce inculcates the virtues of industry, frugality, and temperance, it also inculcates vices such as avarice, envy, and short-sighted self-centeredness. Smith recognized that good government requires virtues such as honor, moral rectitude, patriotism, magnanimity, and a far-sighted perspective, to which the commercial vices are fairly opposed. Smith considered this a problem in his own day, as Great Britain was threatening to become a nation of shopkeepers, ruled by classes trained not in statesmanship but in commerce, governed not by codes of honor but by self-interest. The problem has resonance today as well.

All science communication, even the most formal research paper, is ultimately communication about persons (at the very least, the projected persona of the writer). This paper draws insights from philosophy, sociology, and literary studies to explore what is at stake in communication about persons in science, and to articulate some general ethical principles. A slightly shorter version of this essay appears in Ethics and Practice in Science Communication (University of Chicago Press, 2018).